e-flux Architecture Positions 03/22 Photograph of a convoy of people, including communities of Sikh farmers, migrating to East Punjab with belongings and livestock, naturalized within the landscape as part of the “Great Migration” series. Margaret Bourke-White, Migration in India (1947). It took over not only the homes and lands of “evacuees,” those who had fled, but also those imagined as leaving: creating the ambiguous category of “intending evacuees,” it dispossessed one religious community to give occupations to refugees of another.6 As religious minorities were forced out of dense, multi-religious neighborhoods that had been forged over generations, these evacuations and occupations haunt these cities to this day. Names left on buildings, abandoned temples, perfumeries, bakeries, and other small businesses continue to signpost roots and uprooting. Partitions violently created the territorial contours of new nations, and are inscribed everywhere into built forms. Muslims became citizens of the newly carved Pakistan, equally large numbers became Indians, trailed by the specter of political and spatial incommensurability. In cities like Delhi, the new Nehruvian state planned “Muslim zones” as part of its commitment to inclusion under secularism, to provide enclaves for the safety of those who stayed on.8 Muslim ghettos have ever since been stigmatized as “mini-Pakistans,” and anti-Muslim violence has often included the taunt of “go to Pakistan.” The spatial logics of omnipresent partitions organize how we live with difference now. The Partition of 1947 was driven by the Muslim question in India, about where Muslims as a political community belonged in the new age of nationalism.7 This idea, of partition, thrust all religious minorities, but especially those who remained where they had always lived, into new liminalities within and between nation-states. While some Planning the Nation Where refugees could not be accommodated in the homes and lands of those “evacuated,” densely inhabited camps, unplanned but not without design, offered a highly regulated yet perennially temporary spatial arrangement. 03

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